a talker over Mrs. Allen, in a family of children; and when she had expatiated on the talents of her sons and the beauty of her daughters, Mrs. Allen had no similar information to give, no similar triumphs to press on the unwilling and unbelieving ear of her friend.  She was forced to sit and to appear to listen to all these maternal effusions, and to be introduced, along with Catherine, to the three Miss Thorpes, who proved to be sisters of a young man who was at the same college as Catherine’s brother James.  James, indeed, had actually spent the last week of the Christmas vacation with the family near London.

The progress of the friendship thus entered into by Catherine and Isabella, the eldest of the Miss Thorpes, was quick as its beginning was warm; and they passed so rapidly through every gradation of increasing tenderness that there was shortly no fresh proof of it to be given to their friends and themselves.  They called each other by their Christian name, were always arm in arm when they walked, pinned up each other’s train for the dance, and were not to be divided in the set; and if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of wet and dirt, and shut themselves up to read novels together.  One day, after they had been talking of “Udolpho,” of other “horrid” books and of their favourite complexion in a man, they met Catherine’s brother James and Isabella’s brother John in a gig.  On introduction, the latter proved to be a smart young man of middle height, who, with a plain face and ungraceful form, seemed fearful of being too handsome unless he wore the dress of a groom, and too much like a gentleman unless he were easy where he ought to be civil, and impudent where he might be allowed to be easy.  James, of course, was attached to Isabella.  “She has so much good sense,” he said, “and is so thoroughly unaffected and amiable.”

At the dance at the upper rooms which took place on the evening of the same day, Mr. Tilney made his reappearance, and introduced his sister to Catherine.  Miss Tilney had a good figure, a pretty face, and a very agreeable countenance.  Her air, though it had not all the decided pretension, the resolute stylishness, of Miss Thorpe’s, had more real elegance; and her manners showed better sense and better breeding.  She seemed capable of being young and attractive at a ball, without wanting to fix the attention of every man near her.

III.—­Catherine Morland Among Her Friends

Unfixed as Catherine’s general notions were of a what a man ought to be, she could not entirely repress a doubt of Mr. John Thorpe’s being altogether completely agreeable.  A tattler and a swaggerer, having elicited, as he thought, from Catherine that she was the destined heiress of Mr. Allen, he twice endeavoured to detach her, by a glaring lie, from keeping engagements with the Tilneys; and when he did succeed in persuading her to go with him in his gig,